Middlebury Campus 1965-04-22 : Volume 1, Issue 1

Ultiihlplwrtj Glampua

Mt x#az\nt 8>uppbm?ttt

Vol. I

Friday, April 23, 1965

No, 1

The Nation Still Ponders Its Destiny in Recalling the Great Struggle
That Ended in Triumph and Tragedy One Hundred Years Ago:

The War and Mr. Lincoln

wmnrcrop college

Once More RARY

APft 2 9 locr

By William B. Canon ” **5

l_) UH1NG the past four years,
Americans — or those among us who set
store by such things — have been hard at
work celebrating the Centennial of the Ci-
vil War. Civic groups, patriotic organiza-
tions (blue or gray), local chowder and
marching societies, war buffs, and ac-
cessible scholars have had a perfect
field day with the crowded calendar of
events that ran from Sumter to Appo-
mattox. It is doubtful that the smallest
skirmish or remotest military maneuver
escaped their attention. Every battle
has been marked, according to the ar-
rangement committee's resources of
cash, imagination, zeal, and rabidity,
with varying assortments of parades,
pageants, odes, costumed reenactments,
and oratory — the last being, of course,
copious and indispensable. Americans
seldom do things by halves.

We probably overdid it, but it may
have needed doing. Ritual observances,
even when exaggeration makes them
ludicrous, are a society’s formal way of
touching base with its heritage, of re-
affirming a bond with people and deeds
and events that still matter. For America
the Civil War continues to matter, wheth-
er our ancestors were actually present or
whether they came later. The legacy
is timeless, and runs from coast to
coast. What the nation was and is and
might become were partly forged in that

Mr. Catton, associate professor of history
at Mlddlebury, Is the co-author, with his
father Bruce Cotton, to Two Hoads to
Sumter, and with Arthur S. Link, of
American Epoch lie is currently work-
Iiir on a biography of John W. Garrett,
president of the Baltimore Ohio Ball-
road front 1858 to 1884.

furnace, for better or worse. And in-
stinctively we know it, even if there
are overtones and implications that we
sometimes forget.

And so, in commemoration, we have
summoned forth once more all the ghosts
and echoes of our strange trial by com-
bat. Once again we have dwelt vicari-
ously amid the watchfires of a hundred
circling camps and listened to the com-

pelling dissonance of the guns and
bugles. Even to a generation that has
almost entirely outgrown the notion that
there can be romance in war, parts of
the spectacle quickened the pulse and
brought a lump to the throat. We were
watching a tragedy, uniquely our own.
whose plot and ending we knew. Though
we might smile or wince at the quality
of the commemoration, we could seldom
fail to respond in some way to the quali-
ty of what was being commemorated.

The very place names still resound
with an odd blend of tragic grandeur

and rustic homeliness, at once the mar-
tial thunder of armies locked in his-
toric battle and the twangy sing-song of
a station agent calling the stops from
an old railroad timetable. The names
on our land have their own magic, even
when, as in most cases, nothing ever
happened there.

But things happened, a century ago,
at Ball's Bluff and Bull Run, at Donel-
son, Shiloh. Malvern Hill, Pea Ridge,
Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellors-
ville, Stone's River, Vicksburg, Gettys-
burg, Chickamauga, Yellow Tavern,
Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, Winchester,
Petersburg . . . and points south and
west. Things happened, too, on bits and
pieces of terrain or beside man-made
structures that accidentally became
parts of battlefields, and many of these
connote something of the horror that
made them landmarks: Devil’s Den, Lit-
tle Round Top, Bloody Angle, Sunken
Road, the Wilderness, and a bucolic ar-
ray of so-and-so's house and such-and-
such church and numberless fields and
woods and orchards — names unknown
beyond the local maps until war's huge
paw swiped bloodily across them.

The drama and color — for war
sometimes has them, interleaved among
the pain and agony — took pale form
once again as solemn invocations to this
or that portion of those honored dead
conjured up visions: flame and gunsmeke
over Charleston harbor in that gray
April dawn of 1861; dour Jackson stand-
ing like a stone wall at First Manassas;
laughing Jcb Stuart, gaily riding his
plumes and his troopers clear around a
Union army; A. P. Hill’s division ar-
riving after a 25-mile forced march in
time to save Lee’s right wing at Antiet-

am; Confederates cheering the Northern
army’s gallant, suicidal charges up the
well-entrenched heights opposite Fred-
ericksburg; the succinct message of a
hitherto unknown general announcing
that his only terms were unconditional
surrender.

The picture-book splendor of George
Pickett’s five thousand veterans dress-
ing their ranks as they marched into the
hail of Northern fire on the third day at
Gettysburg; Farragut’s warships run-
ning the rebel batteries at Vicksburg,
first sign that the Father of Waters
would once again flow unvexed to the
sea; the columns of Jackson and Early
and Sheridan maneuvering in turn
across the green-and-gold valley of the
Shenandoah; C. S. S. Alabama at large
on the sea lanes while C. S. S. Virginia,
ex-Merrimac, wheezed out of Norfolk to
challenge the blockading fleet and sym-
bolize the end of an era. at sea.

Still the parade went on: Federal
soldiers spontaneously storming an im-
pregnable position along Missionary
Ridge and putting a veteran Southern
army to rout; Robert E. Lee astride
Traveler while battle smoke and rebel
yells swirled across the Virginia land-
scape; William Tecumseh Sherman
branding his name and the meaning of
war in a swath across Georgia; and fi-
nally the sound of Sheridan’s bugles
and the sight of Federal infantry at
Appomattox telling Lee that the enemy
had outreached him and the end was at
hand.

The end came promptly, and with it,
a century later, an end to the observ-
ances. The Civil War Centennial was
virtually over with the ceremony at Ap-
pomattox on April 9. One or Uvo events
were still to be commemorated, but the
observance of Lee's surrender marked
the real finish. Not much of importance
remained to be done, one hundred years
ago, after that quiet, final confrontation
between the courtly Virginian, already a
legend, whose lean ragged remnant of
an army had been brought to bay at
last, and the firm-jawed commander
with the lieutenant-general’s stars pin-
ned to his dusty private's uniform,
agreeing on terms of peace and parole
while the endless blue columns coiled
about this remote crossroad in south-
central Virginia, strangely quiet in their
hour of victory, soon to stand and snap
unbidden to present arms as the beaten
Army of Northern Virginia filed between
the Union ranks to stack their arms
and furl their battle-flags for the last
time.

T HERE was drama in all of this,
most assuredly. No society need apolo-
gize for wanting to invoke such mem-
ories. Yet there is danger that the
patriotic speeches and old paintings and
colorful tableaux will conspire to pre-

Page 2

“ LONG ABRAHAM LINCOLN A LIT-
TLIi LONGER." Harpers Weekly re-
joices after the November, 1864, election
returns.

serve a two-dimensional memory of the
Civil War. Safely insulated from the re-
cent memorial services was the con-
flict's brutal, seamy underside. The
price of valor and gallantry came high.
Part of the bill was rendered in the form
of looted homes, burned cities, blackened
countryside, profiteering, corruption, the
sale of faulty material to the army, the
withholding of needed supplies, rioting,
mob violence, influence peddling, arbi-
•j trary arrests, executions for treason or

| dereliction of duty — all of the ugliness

^ that leers and skulks in the wreckage

Ej of war's train. Part of the price was a

* crop of hatred and bitterness that

® sprouted with Lire first casualty lists and

^ bore fruit long after the guns were si-

Sr lent.

Gallantry also cost some six hun-
dred thousand lives. Bear in mind
that this was more than the nation suf-
fered in the Revolutionary, 1812, Mexi-
can, Spanish-American, Korean, and
first and second World Wars combined.
What these dead Civil War youths and
their unborn children might have con-
tributed to the nation in the restless
era after Appomattox will never be
known, but no society can ever be quite
the same after losing every tenth male
of military age.

We got more for this fearsome price,
of course, than a record of valor and pag-
eantry. Everyone knows this, even if its
import is frequently overlooked. The Un-
ion survived and slavery perished, in-
stead of the other way around. There
can be honest debate as to whether a
terrible war was necessary to accom-
plish these ends, none at all as to wheth-
er the ends were good. They were worth
what they cost, and more, so long as we
do not make the mistake of forgetting
how enormous the cost was or what the
fruits of victory really meant.

This generation, in fact, cannot af-
ford to forget any of the lessons of the
Civil War. For we have promises to keep,
and miles to go before we sleep, and to
say that we would rather not, or that
we are tired of hearing about it, is to-
tally irrelevant. A deferred commitment
has come due. The most significant por-
tion of the war's vast legacy has been
bequeathed to us intact, and it is a
stunner: we are to administer its unfin-
ished business. The option of deferring
this legacy, which our ancestors blithely
exercised for nearly a century, has per-
manently expired. As Harry Truman put
it, the buck stops here. A choice still
exists, but the one we no longer have is
that of postponement, of closing our eyes
m hopes that the problem will go away.

It won’t.

Perhaps that is lesson number one
fiom the Civil War generation. Their
dilemma wouldn’t go away, either, al-
though nearly everyone fervently wanted
it to. That dilemma, in brief, was the

future of chattel slavery as a national in-
stitution. Sooner or later, a republic
with the traditions and aspirations sym-
bolized by the Declaration of Independ-
ence was going to have to face the
appalling, blasphemous incongruity pos-
ed by this institution. Early Americans
did not deny this incongruity, but slav-
ery's periodic intrusions upon the nation-
al conscience — like a firebell in the
night, as a worried Jefferson put it —
were easier to ignore than answer. (So
are the first twinges of a bad tooth, or
the early swelling of a cancer.)

S LAVERY grew especially conven-
ient to ignore when it became an insep-
arable adjunct of the booming cotton in-
dustry, and hence of the entire American
economy, in the half-century preceding
the Civil War. Thanks largely to cotton,
which created an important joint part-
nership among British textile manufac-
turers, Yankee merchants, and Southern
planters, the complex system of prop-
erty in man represented, by 1860, an in-
vestment — land and equipment aside —
worth well over two billion dollars, with
corresponding legal title to the life and
labor of three and one half million hu-
man beings.

Cotton was king, and many a for-
tune could be made in the king’s service
on both sides of the Atlantic, but this
was more justification than cause for
the nation’s reluctance to take a long,
hard look at its peculiar institution.
Important though colton was to
American prosperity and the world
market, few people genuinely believed
that the whole elaborate process — the
plants blossoming in endless fields be-
neath the Southern sun, the gins and the
presses, the bales stocked along river
levees and seaside quays, the laden side-
wheelers churning downstream toward
New Orleans or Mobile, the tall square
riggers beating up the coast from the
cotton ports to Manhattan or Boston, the
transatlantic packets, the bank drafts
on cotton circulating across the western
world, the whir of spindles in Lancashire
and along the Merrimac, the brimming
drygoods counters in every European
shop and frontier trading post — that all
of this would somehow cease to func-
tion if the fieldhand who picked and gin-
ned and baled and stacked much of the
world's cotton suddenly stopped being a
slave. People often tried to argue this
way, but it did not take vast discernment
to see that slavery, as a labor system,
was convenience rather than necessity.

* * * * * *

Always, sooner or later, you came
back to those three and a half million
human beings. They had dark skins, and
their background was a continent sunk
in barbarism - at least in the opinion
of an era that tended to draw easy as-
sumptions, confuse cause and effect,

and mistake the farthest outer threshold
of scientific knowledge for its inner
sanctum. These dark-skinned folk were
sometimes loyal and even lovable, but
fundamentally the white man's inferior,
consigned by the Almighty to be hewers
of wood and drawers of water. Slavery
seemed an eminently logical answer to
the problem of containing large numbers
of a people whom white society regard-
ed as alien, half savage, and totally un-
assimilable.

But people, all the same. Nineteenth-
century versions of science and Scrip-
ture could both be cited to support
claims that the Negro was inferior, but
theories that denied his humanity were
neither reputable nor comforting; they
flew in the face of too much evidence.
Rights that the revolutionary generation
had pronounced inalienable and truths
it had called self-evident had a way of
intruding at about this point Americans
read more of the Bible, too, than those
obscure Old Testament passages that
slavery apologists were fond of quoting;
most people knew that the message of
Christianity pointed in another direction.

The American conscience, North and
South, could never really rest easy with
slavery. Since it was difficult to face the
alternatives,* people dodged the prob-
few occasions, and despite vociferous
protest from a handful of abolitionists,
they succeeded pretty well until the
eighteen-forties. In Allan Nevins’ apt
metaphor, “men walked softly not to
rouse the sleeping tiger.'' Unfortunately,
the issue had a way of injecting itself
into every topic on the national agenda.
It also had a way of stirring the emo-
tions, and before long men not only for-
got to walk softly; they rattled sticks
back and forth along the bars of the
cage.

White Americans were too imbued
with moral purpose to ignore the slav-
ery problem and too imbued with rac-
ism to solve it properly or even face it
intelligently. It proved far easier, once
people could no longer evade the ques-
tion, simply to quarrel. The quarrels were
vehement, genuine, and bitter, but al-
ways somewhat oil the subject. They

•One alternative, seized by a few
during the early nineteenth century with
an odd blend of cynicism, evangelical
zeal, and wishful thinking, was coloniza-
tion: the idea that it would be possible
to ship several hundred thousand Ameri-
can Negroes to Africa. A few thousand
were actually sent, during forty
years or so of spasmodic effort — about
as many as were born into slavery in
one year. Aside from the fact that very
few Negroes wanted to go, many of them
dating their American ancestry as far
back as most white families and having
not the remotest interest in Africa, colon-
ization was a blind delusion from the
outset. The country totally lacked the re-
quired financial resources, unity of sen-
timent. and willingness to sacrifice.

ranged over questions of territorial ex-
pansion, war, diplomacy, the right of free
speech, and even bread-and-butter items
like a transcontinental railroad, harbor
improvements, tariffs, and the price of
homesteads. They revolved around the
right of slavery in federal terrorities, the
right or duty of Congress to legislate on
the subject, and finally (less removed
from slavery than they appear) the na-
ture of the federal union, the meaning of
the Constitution, the location of sover-
eignty, and the right of a state to secede.

o NLY by these circuitous ways
could this generation blunder toward a
showdown with slavery, and when the
showdown finally came it was ostensi-
bly over something else. Accidents of
climate, geography, and economic spe-
cialization had isolated slavery in one
section of the country. Because the long
array of quarrels had challenged vested
interests and touched men in sensitive
areas, variously bound up with feelings
of security and well-being and differing
concepts of patriotism, liberty, morality,
and race, the quarreis generated suspi-
cion and hatred and above all fear.
Demagogues arose to prey upon this.
Fear of slavery and its implications pro-
duced a powerful now political par-
ty in the North; fear of this party
drove the deep South into rebellion; re-
sentment born of fear united the North
in an effort to crush it. And the war
came.

It was a war for union, then, at the
outset. Northerners did not take up arms
after Sumter in order to free the slaves.
But tne conflict had not progressed very
far before slavery got in the way, and
as the Union war effort picked up speed
it simply ran over the peculiar institu-
tion. Slavery dissolved wherever the
Federal armies appeared, and one did
not have to be an abolitionist in order to
feel that returning tnese eager fugitives
to their masters was both inhumane and
impractical. Northerners soon saw the
logic in what was happening, and in the
midst of the war for Union — half by
accident, half reluctantly, with a dawn-
ing sense that what tney were dving was
right but with little awareness of what
would follow — they put an end to Slav-
ery. The consequences, by and large,
they ducked. And this became a habit
for almost a century, even as ducking
slavery had been a habit before 1845.

Nobody likes facing this kind of
thing. There was nothing particularly
noble about the decision to destroy slav-
ery. Until the harsh logic of war put
a new face on the matter, only a few
really wanted to do it, and these few had
been mobbed and scorned and shrieked
at for a generation — for no other rea-
son than that they had insisted upon tell-
ing the rest of society, often without
much tact, what had to be done. People

Page 3

like this are seldom popular, because
what has to be done is seldom very
pleasant.

But somehow, after an incredible
amount of violence and partly by acci-
dent, it got done anyway. The echoes of
the guns died away, and after Appomat-
tox the nation turned wearily to the
tasks of restoration. Within a week, it
experienced one more event to commem-
orate — a bizarre, grisly capstone to
the whole tragic business, a kind of sym-
bolic reminder that the noblest and
ugliest aspects of the war were two sides
of the same coin.

No self respecting novelist or play-
wright would dare concoct a climax as
melodramatic and implausible as that
scene in Ford's Theater on the night of
April 14, 1865: the buildup of whispered
conspiracies and night rides, the muffled
figure sliding into the presidential box,
the shot ringing out, the assassin leaping
grotesquely onto the stage brandishing
his pistol and mouthing his absurd Latin
phrase before posturing off to begin his
doomed flight, the screams and excite-
ment, the lank form stretched limply on
a bed, and the life inexorably ebbing
away through the long night while cab-
inet members and politicians watched
beside. The war had claimed one final
victim, and the legend of Abraham Lin-
coln suddenly blossomed with the lilacs
as the funeral train left its smoke trail
and sounded its soft rhythmic dirge a-
cross the spring landscape on the way
home to Illinois.

L INCOLN was bound to become a
legend. Martyrdom froze the image like
a photograph in his hour of triumph, with
the Union secure and the bondsman free.
Because most Americans, then and there-
after, approved these results and rec-
ognized the slain President as the major
instrument in achieving both, he quick-
ly joined Washington at the very center
of the American pantheon, revered and
quoted and honored and studied until,
over the years, the legend became more
real than the man. The endless anecdotes
and recurrent tributes have raised his
pedestal higher and higher, until those
who file solemnly past can do little but
stare upward — properly awed, perhaps,
but seeing little save shadowy outlines
looming above the inscriptions on the
base. Lincoln became a god, with a
Greek temple in Washington and like-
nesses everywhere — on a coin, a stamp,
a bill, and portraits on the wall of nearly
every schoolroom, public building, and
lawyer's office in the United States. Such
a figure is easy to worship but difficult
to know.

There are two pitfalls here. One is
that we will take Lincoln for granted,
accepting the fact of his greatness with-
out pondering the reasons for it, con-

.ASSA3S I NATION?;

OF

presides; r LixcoLN.p:;,;;:'

... L ._ t. |

The President Shot at thc§ "I. |
Theatre Last Evening.

CSCRETARY SEWARDf

DAGGERED IN HiS LED,

BUT

NOT MORTALLY WOUNDED.

Clarence and Frederick Sow-
ard Eadly Kurt.

E mi OF THE 4SSAS?EIS.|

Intenso T'-y.cxI cavj" i Ir

Uf T ‘

Washington.

Scene at ths Dsathhed oiV;

Hr. Lincoln.

]. Wilkes Booth, the Actor, the Alleged!
Assassin of the President,

&e., tu > , Ac.

THE OFFICIAL DESPATCH.

Wti p»r» mp r,
WA#mi»CTO'. Apr.l U— i 30 A H
<mtn' pit, Mf Tor* -
nil •• fiitot ft* about 9 M r U , At Ford
lb* 4»M while lUtlng la bit prifAt
I MxjorJi

Headlines from the Neu York Herald of
April , 15, 1865, tell most of the dettails of
the Lincoln assassination.

tent to genuflect absent-mindedly when-
ever his name is mentioned. The other,
in a generation that distrusts commit-
ment and regards cynical irreverence as
a sign of independent thought, is that
Lincoln will become little more than a
big stale cliche — the sort of ponderous
sacred cow that offers an inviting target
for lampoons and Menckenesque shafts.

Lincoln would not have minded the
ridicule, of course. His eye for a joke
never dimmed when he was the butt,
and he would not only join in the laugh-
ter but heartily approve any process by

• which hero worship was cut down to
size. Humor is a reminder that even the
noblest of a nation’s greats are only men
after all.

Even off his pedestal, however, Lin-
coln stood tall and cast a long shadow,
and it helps to remember just why this
is so. When we start laughing at him
there is always a danger that we will
end by laughing at the things he believed
in. If this ever happens, we are in real
trouble.

Peeling away all of the stereotypes
and stock images that surround Abraham
Lincoln will not make him any easier to
understand. For one thing, most of the
stereotypes are true. It is certainly pos-
sible to overglorify him, but the stuff

I of the legend is real enough; it was not
necessary to invent anything. His fabled
sense of humor and love of funny stories
— on and off color — were genuine. Ht
liked them for their own sake, and alsv,
as a way of illustrating a point or avoid-
ing an unequivocal answer. He did in
_ fact enjoy swapping yarns and laughing
with the boys around the cracker barrel
The earlier images, formed long before
his death and even before his presiden-
cy, were equally true — the gangling
youth who read voraciously, taught him-
self law, split rails, and captivated
everyone in his adopted home of New
Salem by taking part in a village de-
bating society and beating the town bully
in a frontier-style wrestling match.

The loftier side of the legend is also
accurate. The quality perhaps closer to
the core of Lincoln than anything else
was compassion, which does much to
explain the breadth and permanence of
his appeal. "Malice toward none" was
more than a catch phrase. Lincoln rose
to prominence in an age of hate, and the
hatred insisted upon finding human tar-
gets. People hated slaveowners, or Ne-
groes, or rebels, or Yankees, or aboli-
tionists, or Republicans, or Democrats,
or foreigners, or various combinations
of these. Lincoln hated no one, although
the provocation was frequently great
land he was not above getting exaspera-
ted). His detestation of slavery was a-
biding, but it did not extend to Southern
ers; “they are no more than we would
be in their situation." Magnanimity, hu-
mility, and a kind heart really were a-
mong his virtues, even as the school-
books say.

(j RANT all of this; what then of the
man ’ He is as hard to locate as ever.
Essentially he was unknowable. Proba-
bly everyone is, but Lincoln seems the
more so because we can see so much
of him and remain just as far away. No
American has been studied harder, an-
alyzed oftener, or subjected to as keen
and many-sided a scrutiny, from con-
temporaries and historians alike. We

Page 4

\

have an embarrassing wealth of testi-
mony. Yet he had a way of exhibiting on-
ly one part of his personality at a time,
and an observer was apt to see this sin-
gle facet often enough to become convinc-
ed that it was the “real" Lincoln. Our
trouble here is that no two of his con-
temporaries ever saw quite the same
facet.

One is reduced, finally, to truisms
that are accurate enough but not really
helpful; some are no more than dodges.
He was extraordinarily complex, which
is an overused word that happens to fit
beautifully here, but complexity is the
lock rather than the key to his charac-
ter. We can also proclaim, again with
more truth than light, that the whole
of Lincoln was greater than the sum of
the parts. Certainly he was as full of
paradox as any human who ever walked;
he Ms Winston Churchill's classic defini-
tion of Russia as a riddle wrapped with-
in an enigma inside a mystery.

Consider just a few of the contradic-
tions. He shared Jefferson's conviction
that mental exercise strengthened the
mind as directly as physical exercise de-
veloped the muscles; his reasoning, in
court and correspondence and speeches
and state papers, usually had a clear,
precise logic that attested to his mental
sharpness. Yet the man who admired the
mathematical symmetry of Euclid and
believed in the power of human reason
was also a mystic, a visionary, a believ-
er in dreams. The chuckling, joke-telling
Lincoln was afflicted with a chronic mel-
ancholy that often “dripped from him
as he walked," as one friend wrote, and
occasionally almost unbalanced him. The
folksy, gregarious Lincoln was basically
a loner who often preferred solitude and
kept his friendships at arm's length.
There was a remoteness about him. Ev-
en his closest friends called him Lincoln
rather than Abe and admitted that they
did not really know him at all.

And finally, although the compassion
and tender-hearted warmth were alto-
gether genuine, anyone who interpreted
these milder virtues as a sign of softness
was making a huge mistake. The brood-
ing, patient thinker could act fast and
act hard, and the man of compassion
could show a streak of something very
like ruthlessness and move toward his
goal with all the compassion of a steam-
roller. He was also, first and last, a po-
litical manipulator who knew how to cut
corners and was not above using federal
troops to guarantee election victories in
key districts.

IVl UCH is made, rightly, of the
fact that he was one of the few in this
anxiety-ridden era who could fight with-
out hating. Yet it was essentially Lincoln
who formulated and carried through the
policy of unconditional surrender; he

must bear final responsibility for the
kind of total war that Sherman made in
Georgia and Sheridan in the Valley and
Grant in Virginia. No “hater” could have
prosecuted the unrelenting Union effort
with more vigor and determination. He
ran for re-election in 1R64 pledged to vic-
tory regardless of cost, and a large por-
tion of that appalling casualty list might
have been saved if Abraham Lincoln
had not insisted, from Sumter right on
through to Appomattox, upon going for
broke.

Taking him off his pedestal — undei-
fying him, as it were — is not overly dif-
ficult. Whether this brings us apprecia-
bly closer to Lincoln the man is another
question. Like most great leaders, Lin-
coln can be all things to all people. He
wrote and said a good deal, and it is
not hard to find what you want to see;
wherever there is Scripture there are
devils to quote it, and some of Lincoln's
champions are an embarrassment.* Try
as we might, the "real Lincoln" will al-
ways remain shrouded in mystery.

* * * * * *

There is less excuse for fuzzy-mind-
edness on the subject of why he remains
important, or stands so imperturbably
on that pedestal despite our most ir-
reverent shafts. The vital elements in
his philosophy are clear enough. He had
something compelling to say to this gen-
eration. And we ignore him at our peril,
for neither the Civil War nor the entire
American experiment- which is still very
much in process— can be understood
without him. (This discussion is less con-
cerned with taking Lincoln off his ped-
estal than with emphasizing the real
reasons for his being there.)

Politics is by all odds the best place
to start. This probably strikes a sour
note, since most Americans regard poli-
tics with mingled suspicion and distaste.
Lincoln was a consummate master of
the political art, and his measure simply
cannot be taken in any other context.
Politics was his natural habitat, his mi-
lieu. his profession — and he was a pro-
fessional, to the innermost depth of his
being. He thought, spoke, planned, and

*The Communists have long adopted
him, and on the other side he can be
quoted out of context to give aid and
comfort to racists. A careful rending
of Lincoln on the subject of the Negro
indicates that he was color blind, but
more acutely aware than most antisla-
very men of the depth and virulence of
the average white man's antipathy to the
black man in likh century America. His
statements to white and black audiences
alike often made due allowance for this,
but Lincoln shared no appreciable a-
mount of the prejudice of which he spoke.
Communists, Negrophofoes, and champ-
ions of the radical right must distort
Lincoln out of all recognition in order
to use him — but then, d stortion is the
stock in trade of all three groups.

operated within the political framwork.
As a result he fully understood the value
of compromise, pressure, parliamentary
maneuver, party loyalty, delay, logroll-
ing, saying less than one meant, and a
range of other tactics — everything, in
short, that people have more or less
vaguely in mind when they refer to poli-
tics as sordid and not very nice.

Well, it is sordid and not very nice,
at least in part. It is also, and more im-
portantly, the process by which all of the
diverse and often conflicting goals and
aspirations of individuals and groups
within a society are reconciled, com-
promised, adjusted, and translated from
ideas into programs and from programs
into action. It is every bit as full of man-
euver and wheeling-and-dealing as crit-
ics claim, and for an excellent reason:
it is necessarily concerned not merely
with human ideals and aspirations but
with human greed and ambition.

L INCOLN understood all of this.
He knew and respected the infinite uses
of political power, and operated the cum-
bersome mechanism of party machinery
with a keen sense of balance. He saw
man whole — self-seeker and visionary,
schemer and dreamer. A society’s high-
est aspirations must always be recon-
ciled with its baser drives; the American
dream itself is an irreducible alloy of
unlimited benevolence and unabashed
self-interest. An idealist who never lost
touch with reality, he embraced neither
the illusion of human perfectibility nor a
cynical surrender to human limitation.
And he recognized that the noblest as
well as the basest of goals could only be
translated into action through the medi-
um of politics. In America, lofty aspira-
tions and unlofty political process were
allies, uneasy but inseparable.

As a politician, Lincoln appreciated
the virtues of patience, tact, modera-
tion, and the art of the possible. These
are real virtues, often in short supply in
this country because we prefer to do
things in a hurry; our ambitions and our
words tend to be immoderate, and we
have never really liked admitting that
anything is impossible. The do-it-now,
do-it-big, and do-it-all approach has been
a source of strength as well as weakness,
of course. But we have long passed the
easy adolescent years of our national de-
velopment, when we could laugh at cau-
tion and push blindly ahead. In the taut,
intricate era of the late twentieth century,
Lincolnesque maturity and restraint are
indispensable.

Yet even Lincoln's storied modera-
tion has its qualifiers, and they are im-
portant. It is customary, in calling the
roll of his virtues, to stress this modera-
tion as a welcome contrast to the mis-
guided, excessive zeal of the abolition-
ists and Radical Republicans— who were,

Page 5

by this view, primarily responsible for
the war and the later evils of Recon-
struction because they insisted upon de-
stroying slavery and admitting the Ne-
gro to citizenship before he or the so-
ciety were ready. Lincoln, on the other
hand, knew better. He said in 1854 that
“with all earthly power” he would not
know what to do about slavery, recog-
nizing the complexity and explosive na-
ture of the problem. He did not intend to
force the issue, or go faster than the
glacial shifts in public opinion would
permit. And he insisted, in 1861, upon
defining the Northern war aim as re-
storation of the Union rather than de-
struction of slavery. (It is this line of
reasoning that has enabled the South
to join the rest of the nation in making
Lincoln a hero. Latter-day exponents of a
go-slow or do-nothing civil rights policy
are fond of claiming him on the same
grounds.)

T HERE are elements of truth here,
but at bottom they rest upon a miscon-
ception of what Lincoln's moderation
really meant. On the subject of slavery,
the moderate approach would only begin
to operate after a national consensus
had been reached. To Lincoln, slavery
was an undiluted moral wrong that must
someday be extinguished. He recognized
the virture in doing this slowly, provid-
ing time for all of the necessary social,
economic, and psychological adjust-
ments. But the nation would have to
accept the premise that slavery was
doomed. Only then, he reasoned, could
it find the wisest means to this end. A
problem cannot be solved until it is fac-
ed.

The important part of Lincoln's pre-
war career, from 1854 to 1860, was de-
voted to making his position on slavery
clear and ultimately making it the pro-
gram of the Republican Party. The speci-
fic controversy at issue in the eighteen-
fifties was slavery's power to expand
into federal territories, which the South
claimed as a constitutional right. Lin- ^
coin was a leading opponent of this
view, on the explicit theory — which®"
Southern leaders shared — that once sla-
very was contained within its present
area the process of setting it on the road
to ultimate extinction could begin,

Lincoln, recognizing necessity, wan-
ted this process to be slow, but he wan-
ted it to begin right away — and here he
was as uncompromising and immoder-
ate as the most radical abolitionist. The
Republican Party took this stance, es-
sentially, in 1860, and Southern leaders
who demanded secession rather than
accept a Republican president had read
the cards correctly: Lincoln and his par-
ty would never let slavery expand. If it
could not expand, it would someday die.
Someday might be a long way off, but

only the time would henceforth be de-
batable, not the fact. And by 1860 the
somewhat paranoid condition of South-
ern leadership could not abide this no-
tion; they were prepared to destroy the
Union before admitting even the abstract
possibility that slavery's days might be
numbered. On this issue, which was cen-
tral to the whole controversy, secession-
ists were fundamentally right in seeing
little difference between the man from
Illinois and the hard core of abolitionism.

OR would Lincoln permit compro-
mise when his containment policy ac-
tually did produce secession and the
threat of civil war. The one compromise
proposal with any hope of acceptance
in the winter of 1860-61 was that of Sen-
ator Crittenden of Kentucky, which
would have reopened the door to slavery
expansion. Lincoln flatly refused to let
his party accept Crittenden’s plan: "on
this point hold firm, as with a chain of
steel,” he wrote. The party complied,
and the last hope of averting secession
was gone.

Lincoln's antislavery convictions ac-
tually underlay his devotion to the Union,
and the war he avowedly waged in order
to preserve it was less removed from
the slavery controversy than it appears.
Lincoln appreciated, perhaps more keen-
ly than the people he led, just why the
Union was worth saving. He regarded it
as an experiment in democracy, and the
keystone in the democratic arch was the
concept of individual freedom. If the
Union collapsed you could never do much
about slavery, while if the Union survi-
ved right-thinking men could untimately
bring an end to slavery by peaceable
means. (When the war began to destroy
slavery on its own, he moved to take ad-
vantage of this — as an unforeseen war-
time bonus, and as a means of hasten-
ing the Confederate collapse.) In any
case, liberty and Union were to Lincoln,
as they had been to Daniel Webster, one
and inseparable.

Me * * * * #

Lincoln's concept of freedom was
comprehensive, absolute, and uncom-
promising. Here his message for our
generation reaches clear to the marrow.
Freedom — meaning that complex of
values connoted by the “life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness” passage in the
Declaration of Independence — has to
be extended across the board, or it has
no meaning at all. Deny it to one person
or group and you endanger everyone's
possession of it, for the logic which jus-
tifies the denial of freedom to anyone is
a sword that cuts in any direction, usable
by any group strong enough to enforce
its will upon another. Here freedom and
equality are not incompatible, as is often
claimed, but mutually interdependent.

Freedom loses its meaning whenever we
are not equal in our right to enjoy it.

IVlOREOVER, Lincoln saw quite
clearly that there are no permanent way
stations — none — between slavery and
full citizenship. Freedom is contradict-
ed not by slavery alone, but by any de-
nial of the rights that freedom confers.
Second-class citizenship in all its forms
and guises is merely a variant of slavery.
The pointer will not rest indefinitely be-
tween one end of the scale and the other.
Our choice in the matter is limited to
deciding which end of the scale we want.
One end, toward which we are now
clumsily and painfully moving, is that
of full and unstinting application of the
ideals embodied in the Declaration of
Independence. It means completing the
task begun one hundred years ago and
deferred until recently. It is the high
ground in the sunlight upon which Lin-
coln's eyes and hopes were fixed.

The other end of the scale is within
our grasp, too. It is deceptively easy to
get there, by slow degrees. First we con-
vince ourselves that "the pendulum has
swung too far,” and "freedom has to be
earned,” and "you cannot legislate mor-
ality," and "what goes on down there is
none of our business,” and "each com-
munity ought to be allowed to solve its
problems without outside interference."
Then we frown on agitation, prohibit
demonstrations, and accept the notion
that police dogs, cattle prods, night
sticks, and gas are permissible ways for
a community to "solve its problems
without outside interference." We identi-
fy all opposition to this as un-American,
illegal, and fair game. We declare mar-
tial law in our cities to keep the ghettos
in line, recruiting our emergency police
from that most available element, the
goon-squad element in white society.

Soon, in the interest of stability and
order, we will amend the Constitution to
make room for different classes of citi-
zens; state laws will be passed to take
care of related matters. By this time,
we are in the realm of compounds, the
pass system, and "detention camps."
And the ultimate stopping-place is at
hand, reached so imperceptibly as to be
almost painless for those who keep their
eyes and their minds properly closed —
the stopping-place symbolized by the
jackboot, the midnight arrest, the long
laden trains moving by night, and the
row of gas ovens inside the barbed wire
enclosures at Buchenwald and Dachau.
We will have lost some ten per cent of
our population and one hundred per cent
of our soul. The Germans called it "live
Final Solution."

^INCE the end of the Civil War
coincided with the death of the Civil War

Page 6

President, and since war and President
gave meaning each to the other, it is
fitting to close the Centennial with an-
other look at Abraham Lincoln. He was,
first of all, an unsurpassingly eloquent
champion of American democratic val-
ues, recognizing that this nation was in
fact conceived in liberty and dedicated
to the proposition that all men are cre-
ated equal. The original commitment
was reaffirmed and extended during the
Civil War, and after decades of evasion
the nation has once again begun to apply
ideals that are meaningless unless uni-
versal.

Lincoln also reaffirms the values in-
herited from the Judaeo-Christian tra-
dition. (And now abideth faith, hope,
love, these three: but the greatest of
these is love. No sacrilege is intended by
the observation that is pursuit of his goal
Lincoln, too, brought not peace but a
sword.) It was Lincoln who reminded
us that redressing a wrong is a form of

atonement frequently attended by suffer-
ing: if every drop of blood drawn with
the lash must be paid by another drawn
with the sword — or, in modern terms, if
every hurt inflicted by the application of
prejudice must be paid by another in-
flicted in the dismantling of it — why,
then, ‘‘the judgments of the Lord are
true and righteous altogether.”

And finally, Lincoln’s belief in free-
dom did not stop at the water's edge.
The American experiment was a banner
of hope for all humanity, and freedom’s
success in the United States brought it
measurably closer to attainment else-
where. It is significant that in every cor-
ner of the globe Lincoln quickly became
— and remains — by far the best-loved
and most admired of American figures.
He belongs not merely to the ages, as
Edwin Stanton allegedly remarked after
Lincoln’s death, but to all mankind. The
novelist Tolstoi's encomium did not
strike the rest of the world as undue

exaggeration. Remarking that Lincoln’s
heroic stature derived from ‘‘peculiar
moral powers and greatness of char-
acter,” Tolstoi felt that the Emancipator
‘‘was what Beethoven was in music,
Dante in poetry, Raphael in painting,
and Christ in the philosophy of life.”
Lincoln’s appeal is as universal as his
love of freedom, which derived from a
belief in the basic dignity and worth of
the individual. All individuals, every-
where on earth.

This is the challenge of the epoch.
Mark it well. It is a lofty aspiration, and
like the precepts of the Almighty it will
prove a stern taskmaster. Civilization —
not brute existence, but civilization —
will survive on no other basis. And in
this context we have it yet in our power
to make America what it was to Lin-
coln and his era. The choice is ours, as
it was theirs, and Lincoln, as usual,
found the words: "We can nobly save,
or meanly lose, the last, best hope of
earth.”

Page 7

‘Their Physical Dissimilarities Made Them Look Funny as a Team;

Their Personalities Endeared Them to Three Generations of Movie Audiences.

LAUREL 6? HARDY

An Appreciation

By Joel J^lajman

\

J. ^-distinctive aspect of the 1964-
65 Middlebury College Concert-Film
Series is the half-hour short come-
dies preceding each feature film. These
black and white shorts, some silent and
some sound, were filmed and released
by the Hal Roach Studios between 1926
and 1940, and featured the team of Stan
Laurel and Oliver Hardy.

Laurel was born Arthur Stanley
Jefferson in London in 1888. Both his
parents were vaudeville entertainers,
and almost as soon as he was able to
walk he became part of the act. By age
twenty the young Mr. Jefferson had be-
come a master of the mime. He toured
England in a pantomime troupe known
as the “Mumming Birds,” and for two
years he was understudy and close as-
sociate of another young man destined
for greatness, Charles Chaplin. The early
part of the century found both Chaplin
and Laurel (a stage name that eventual-
ly became his legal name* in the United
States in search of bigger fortune in the
new medium of the cinema. The influ-
ence of Chapiin's famous tramp can be
seen in Laurel's first movies, filmed on
Long Island in 1917. Laurel possessed the
same acrobatic physique and grace of
movement that elevated Chaplin’s little
tramp to cinematic immortality. Wheth-
er Stan Laurel would have achieved the
same fame as Chaplain portraying a
similar character is questionable, al-
though it is a fact that Laurel created a
character as polished as Chaplin’s ini-
tial attempts, and unlike Chaplin's many
unsuccessful imitators, he did so before
Chaplin gained recognition. Laurel soon
left the New York studios for Califor-
nia where he acquired a job as script
w’riter and editor at the Hal Roach
Studios. It should be pointed out that in
those days most short comedies were
designed to be little more than evanes-
cent cartoons, and for the most part

Mr. Najman. a psychology major and a
nu mber of the class of 1966, is aLoyal Kan
of Laurel & Hardy.

Page 8

STAS LAI REL ASD OLl\ l H HARD I attempt In sell Christinas trees in July in
"Rig Business,” released in 1926.

were totally without plot or format. Ex-
tras were hired, off the street, pies were
thrown, autos were wrecked, and the
camera rolled on. It was the job of the
editor to piece together the day's footage
into a half hour story with a modicum of
coherency. It was at this task that Stan
Laurel’s incredible sense of timing and
audience reaction became manifest. The
Roach comedies began to stand out
among the slapstick shorts of the day.
Stan possessed an ingenuity of divising
comedy routines that were closely de-
rived from the pitfalls of our everyday
existence, for he felt that the more close-
ly one could identify with a comical rou-
tine, the funnier the routine.

UNE of Roach’s regulars” was
Oliver Norvell Hardy, a rather obese
but highly athletic actor who frequently
played the villain or “heavy” in the ear-
ly silents. Before long Stan himself be-
came a regular (in addition to his other
duties), and by chance appeared in sev-
eral films alongside ‘ Babe” Hardy. In
Hardy, Stan found the necessary com-
plement to the screen personality that
he was evolving. Their physical dissimi-

larities made them look funny as a
team; their personalities endeared them
to three generations of movie audiences.
Stan was the well-meaning dolt whose
childlike naivete and incredible stupidi-
ty brought about the catastrophes that
befell them both, but always seemed to
fall harder on Ollio. Stanley was invari-
ably impervious to all that occurred, his
typical response being an inimitable
delayed “double take.” Oliver's task
was to rectify the uncomfortable situa-
tions that Stanley created, but due to a
stupidity cf a different sort — a stupidity
stemming from a false sense of super-
iority and knowlcdgeability his efforts
usually compounded their dilemma.
Ollic's obsessive fetish with manners and
delicate etiquette in spite of his physi-
que was entertaining in itself, and the
genuine warmth of a forgiving and tol-
erant personality was effectively trans-
mitted to the audience.

Although the team of Laurel and
Hardy was developed before the advent
of sound in movies, their success In the
transition period that curtailed the ca-
reers of many an accomplished come-
dian was perhaps their greatest achieve-

Collection of the Author

merit, Why were they able to bridge the
gap, while such comedians as Fatty
Arbuckle, Harry Langdon, Snub Pol-
lard, and Charlie Chase dropped into ob-
scurity? It can be seen that while other
comedians unsuccessfully attempted to
alter their established screen characters
to the medium of sound film, Stan Lau-
rel technically used sound as an instru-
ment to augment his established brand
of humor. Ideas that were ingenious at
the time but that have long since be-
come cliches were first tried in the early
L & II sound films. The Film Exhibitor’s
Herald reported in lt)29:

"In one spot Hardy hits Laurel over
the head with an automobile jack and
the noise from the blow sounded like the
ringing of an anvil when struck with a
twelve-pound hammer. It is the funniest
sound effect yet recorded."

AnOTHER example is the use of
sound to induce the viewer ’ z imagina-
tion. The camera showed a man slip
and dive at the top of a flight of stairs,
and disappear out of the camera’s range
— an instant of silence and then a sud-
den loud crash. Whereas in a silent film
the viewer would be forced to witness the
^ painful details of the stunt man’s fall,
sound permits him to visualize only the
comical aspects of such a fall.

While working for Roach. Stan Lau-
rel and Oliver Hardy appeared in over
one hundred films; in addition Laurel
personally supervised the editing, di-
recting. and screenplay of all of them.
The polish and quality of the L&H "class-
ics” can be directly attributed to his
dedication to the art of the cinema.

1^ INANCIAL problems forced
Laurel and Hardy to quit the Roach
Studios in 1940. They did not know it
then, but their days of greatness were
over. In order to maintain exposure be-
fore a new generation of movie goers,
they were forced to work for MGM.
where the freedom of manipulation so
necessary for Stan Laurel's creativity
was denied them, and they were fed
poorly written scripts and forced to
adhere to the rigid direction of talentless
men. All of their post - 1940 films (nine
features) must be classified as bad. It
has been suggested that MGM purposely
tried to drum them into oblivion so as to
replace the L & H team before the pub-
lic with two new young MGM "fat and
skinny” comedians, Bud Abbott and
Lou Costello. Unfortunately, these par-
ticular films are the ones most frequently
seen on television nowadays, due to
MGM’s massive television distribution.

Laurel & Hardy's last film was made
while they were on tour in France in
1950. Oliver died in 1958, and Stan died
just recently in California. But as long
as there is a projector and a darkened
theater, they will be remembered.

The Middlebury Campus
Magazine Su p pi e me n t

Produced bj the staff of the student newspaper of
Middlebury College. Editorial and buslnea- offices in
Pro-tor Hall. Middlebury College. Middlebury, Vermont.

Telephones: Dudley 8-2813 or 7293 Opinions expressed in
this magazine do not necessarily reflect the official posi-
tion of the College.

ALAN MAGARY '6(5 Editor-in-Chief

Page 9

THE WAR OM POVERTY:

a message to the Nation's college students...

Inspiring causes have always fired the
imagination of students.

Today the United States is committed
to the greatest humanitarian cause in its
history — a massive counterattack on the
causes of poverty, which are robbing
35,000,000 Americans of the opportum
ties most of us are free to pursue be
cause we had the advantage of a decent
start in life. That start has been denied
to one-fifth of the nation’s people. Thir
teen million of them are children.

fortunate to help the least privileged of
their fellow citizens. You can help this
summer, or for a full year if you choose
as a volunteer in the War on Poverty.

In July and August, 30,000 volunteers
will be needed in their own communities
to assist four- and five-year-old children
of the poor through Project Head Start
Child Development Centers. Thousands
more are needed to live and work among
poor families by enlisting in VISTA, the
domestic Peace Corps.

In Head Start, volunteers work side
by-side with teachers, social workers
doctors, and other professionals to give
pre-school children advantages which
can change the patterns of their lives
Many of these children have never helc
a doll, never scribbled with crayons
Meager environments have blunted then
curiosity. Some are spoken to so rarely
that they are unable to form sentences

Head Start volunteers will read to chil
dren, take them on outings to zoos and

:**r y~i

yy ;■ * „ *

i***-- *

parks, organize creative play tor the*
and help build the security and selt
confidence they need to succeed in
school The rewards come when a with-
drawn child begins to ask questions or
responds to the affection for which he
has been starved. Without such help,
many of these children would be headed
for school failure and the poverty cycle
which trapped their parents.

Many young people who are 18 or
older and can serve tor a year enroll tor
training in VISTA — both to help others
and to enlarge their own capacities tor
teaching, social work, or careers in so-
ciology, economics, law, and other fields.

Home base for VISTA volunteer groups
can be a city tenement row, a struggling
farm community, an Indian reservation,
a migrant labor camp, or a mental hos-
pital. Volunteers may counsel school
dropouts organize recreation programs,
tutor chiiu.ari who are behind in school,
explore job opportunities tor the poor --
in short, do whatever is needed to heir
people find their way up from poverty
Volunteers become respected memberi
of the communities where they work.

The pay is nominal - living expenses
plus $50 a month paid at the end of serv-
ice. But the opportunities are great: you
can help pave the way tor an America in
which the democratic ideal is big enough
to encompass everyone.

Will you lend your abilities to people
who live in need? Join the War on Poverty
today!

Send mail to
school address □

Send mail to
home address □

to: Volunteers

War on Poverty
Washington. D.C.
20506

Clip and mail

Yes. I uant to help the Har on Poverty!

D Please refer me to Head Start programs which will be operating in or near
(location) this summer.

D Please send me information on how I can become a member of VISTA.

Name Age

School Address

Home Address